• the missing box of craft wire, hidden behind some other stuff.
• three half-finished blank books, needing just to be stitched.
• a whole bunch of foam brushes, separated from the rest of the brush herd.

I also observed a few things:

• It is quite possible to have more shoeboxes than one needs for storage.
• Watchmaker tins are cute, but they really do suck for storing jump rings.
• Paints do dry out after twenty years, even well sealed up.
• One person’s ephemera is another person’s trash.
• One person’s perfect storage system is another person’s storage nightmare.
• The average lifespan of a gel pen is something less than five years, even if unused.
• Worktables are much easier to work on when not covered with ten layers of crap.

Finally, I confirmed that a good labelmaker is your best friend when you’re trying to organize a studio!

Observations From Cleaning the Studio is a post from: Art of the Firebird. Some Rights Reserved. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

…an appalling mess to look at, but in all that mess is a haven of creativity and serenity. It’s almost always that way, so it must work for me somehow.? I always have a small space for a studio, and try to cram an insane amount of creative paraphernalia into it. That is bound to lead to clutter, but I do try to organize it as much as I can.

In my starter marriage, I used the dining room as my studio.? We removed the dining room table and I packed two floor looms, two bookcases, two floor-to-ceiling Skandia shelving units filled with yarn and notebooks, a desk made from two filing cabinets with a desktop, a spinning wheel, a straight chair, and various and sundry other miscellanea.? Basically there was a narrow path you could walk through to get from the kitchen door to the foyer (which had no door so I hung a curtain).? It was always a disaster but it was still my solitary, everyone-keep-out refuge and safe haven from the rest of my less-than-happy life.

Now I’m in the smallest bedroom of our condo, with about the same square footage.? The Skandia shelving is still there, and even expanded, but now it contains bookbinding and collage materials,? business supplies, and beads and jewelry components, along with notebooks and still a wee amount of yarn.? The looms have been replaced by my lampworking area, one table with my torch and one with my kiln and primary glass storage.? Another small table tucks in a nook for the paper crafts. Now, though, I have a comfortable chair and reading lamp in one corner so Mr. Frosty can keep me company when he chooses.

At the moment my studio is in worse shape than usual thanks to two spare oxygen concentrators and a map rack with glass tubing and other stuff sitting wherever there is space, since I haven’t found permanent homes for those three items yet.? Once I do (soon!)? I can do a little more tweaking and decluttering to get it to exactly the way it should be…the home of my creative muse, my own play space.

My studio is… is a post from: Art of the Firebird. Some Rights Reserved. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

In a way those looms were my sanity for many years — weaving was my escape from heartache and depression and just plain annoyance during my first marriage.? Yet that meant that once I left the marriage, weaving held such negative connotations that it became emotionally impossible for me to do.? And THAT, my friends, is what made me quit the program at Georgia State in the end.? I had gone in as a weaver, but I could not continue as one.

We’ve done a lot of clearing out and tossing, decluttering and rearranging, in the time we’ve been together, but it has been very hard to let go of the looms even to this point. Weaving and textiles meant a huge amount to me for quite a long time; in fact in some way they were my identity for almost fifteen years.? Even getting them out of the condo and into storage feels like I’m putting part of myself in storage.? But should that part of me be in storage, or is it actually gone and I should just admit that?

Truthfully, I am wishing there were some simple way to get the looms permanently and completely out of my life right now but still get some final value out of them.? I’ve made a half-hearted attempt to advertise the big loom before, but nothing’s come of it to date.? The Baby Wolf I’ve been reluctant to do even that, just in case I ever wanted to go back to weaving.? At this point, though, I finally just don’t see that happening.? If I ever give up lampworking it will likely be because I physically can’t do it any more, and at that point I probably couldn’t weave any more either.

I guess I’ll try to advertise them once again, but more seriously this time.? If that doesn’t pan out, it will be time to contact Pam and see if the Folk School wants two more looms, and just take one hell of a tax deduction next year.

No one said letting go of the past is easy.? Once you can do it, though, it does make you feel freer and lighter.? That’s a good feeling despite the nostalgia for what is gone.

Putting the past into storage is a post from: Art of the Firebird. Some Rights Reserved. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Sometimes, though, I’ll decide to make a boro cane or twisty by starting with a rod of clear, and then just grabbing whatever rod of color my hand happens to fall on (whether that rod is on my table or in my bucket) and smooshing a stripe of it onto the clear. When I do that, I don’t even think about what color I’m grabbing; I just grab and go. I did that a couple of weeks ago at Hot Time in the Mountains on Sunday morning when I was getting ready to pack up. I finally used that twisty a few days ago for some beads, and they are amazingly bright and vibrant, just because I grabbed colors that, if I had actually THOUGHT about it, I never would have put together.

Picture will follow shortly.

Creating Color Combinations is a post from: Art of the Firebird. Some Rights Reserved. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I have another day and a half here, with not that much actual work to do unless a huge horde of students comes by, so who knows what I will manage to do the rest of the week!

More purging is a post from: Art of the Firebird. Some Rights Reserved. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.